We’re all content creators now: content lessons from news editors

The news media don’t have it figured all out, of course. We can easily see that when we look at the declining newspaper revenue and readership year over year. But news media are in the content business and as concepts like content marketing and brand journalism become more accepted, marketers are thrust into the content space too. So why not learn some lessons from the content pros: journalists and editors?

The news media don’t have it figured all out, of course. We can easily see that when we look at the declining newspaper revenue and readership year over year. But news media are in the content business and as concepts like content marketing and brand journalism become more accepted, marketers are thrust into the content space too. So why not learn some lessons from the content pros: journalists and editors?

Pressure to drive traffic, ad revenue

News media have been under tremendous pressure to figure out how to profit from content online, and since their revenue is mostly ad-based, success translates to traffic. Marketers will agree that once you invest time in creating content, you’d like to get some traffic to it. Looking at how news media have tackled this problem and who has succeeded and how are valuable lessons for any content creators, marketers or journalists. Besides, isn’t it better to learn from the mistakes of others than your own?

Creating content for a consumer, not their device

Focus on consumer vs. just their device. This is key, depending on your product or service, people are likely accessing your content on various devices, yes, but the keyword here is still people. It’s important not to focus too much on device, content must be easily accessible via various devices but don’t overlook the actual content and user – remember that at the end of the day, you’re developing content for people, not their devices.

4 audience parameters to keep in mind

A deep consideration of your audience. The presentation looks into several current realities of the consumer: time (content was developed for someone for a particular moment in time), activities (developed around what they’re doing in that moment), IQ/EQ (developed to meet their emotional and intellectual IQ), and behaviours (developed based on their behaviours). – As marketers we should be thinking about these parameters when developing content, try and apply these to your buyer persona and create content around them.

Plagiarizing from a plagiarizer?

Looking to Buzzfeed for inspiration. Now, I am not a big buzzfeed fan, in my opinion they just recycle stale content from Reddit and lack any originality, that being said, the content on Reddit is often great but not easily accessible to many. So, what Buzzfeed did was ingenious is a way; they took Reddit’s (and others’) content and made it accessible (turning it into lists, galleries) instead of Reddit’s forum format. The result? Viral content. Of course the content is often not Buzzfeed’s, but then again, it’s not really Reddit’s either, it’s their community’s; they’re the ones who upvote, troll, and comment. I had a chance to ask Reddit co-founder Alex Ohanian what he thought about the blatant stealing of content ideas, and he didn’t seem to mind much.

Hopefully you’ve found some valuable lessons and commonalities between the problems journalists and editors face, and those we marketers face. It’s an interesting time in that industry, if you like to follow it further I recommend keeping an eye on Poynter and CJR.